30 June 1985
| Achilles (Alan Rickman) and Hector (David Burke) in Troilus and Cressida--'masterful and triumphant." |
HAKESPEARE our contemporary: Howard Davies's
new production of Troilus and Cressida (RSC:
Stratford upon Avon) fills this famous phrase with life. I'm not thinking
of the modish view which compares King Lear to Waiting for Godot because
both have two desolate old men in a desolate countryside. Nor is it merely
because Davies sets the play in the Crimean War. This sounds a self-conscious
device, but it isn't. The Crimean War was one of the last armed conflicts
in which old-fashioned individual gallantry still had some meaning, and
this sense, of personal courage and honest chivalry at their last gasp in
the roar of impersonal and disillusioned warfare, fits perfectly the mood
of this complex, questioning and angry play.
I think that it is this anger which makes it
relatively unpopular. It lacks the moral generosity of the comedies and
the reassuring conservatism and tragic grandeur of the histories. None of
its characters is likeable those who are at all sympathetic such as Hector
or Ulysses, are serving a cause they do not believe in, and we sense Shakespeare's
anger that these spirits are finely touched but not to fine issues.
Ralph Koltai's set shows a great Russian house
thrown into crumbling disorder by the hurricane of war superbly lit by Jeffrey
Beecroft, and echoing to llona Sekacz's music of dissonant pastiche Chopin,
it speaks of ruined gentility and doomed grandeur, Helen, the cause of it
all (Lindsay Duncan); appears but briefly she and Paris (in blisteringly
nasty vignette from Sean Baker) are held together by the weariness of satisfied
addiction. Anton Lesser's Troilus is an intense and unstable youth: unromantic,
volatile, insecure, and like all insecure people, is entirely full of himself.
Cressida (Juliet Stevenson) is opinionated, argumentative and intelligent:
her exhibitions of wit are a means of cloaking her feelings. Troilus loses
her, really, because she perceives him to be more wind than will: he almost
wallows in defeat.
Davies's production touches the very heart
of this dark play when it reveals this kind of self-indulgence. Alan
Rickman's Achilles is a golden boy tarnished by discontent and I unmanned
by self-loathing. Hector (a performance of grizzled, saturnine authority
from David Burke) consents to a war he doesn't believe in with the look
of a man who knows that personal will has no real value. Peter Jeffrey plays
Ulysses as a vulpine statesman with piercing, hooded eyes: a man of pitiless
self-control but quite without beliefs. Clive Merrison's Pandarus has the
enthusiasm of the sedentary bourgeois for heroes and action: he revels in
taunts, indeed almost asks for them. He is the counterpart of Thersites
(Alun Armstrong) a myopic orderly for whom cursing is a physical relief
and clowning a form of self-abasement.
These superb performances remind one of nothing
so much as the world of Dostoevsky they give out the same penetrating and
quite fearless psychological understanding of corroded souls; the same air
of self-torment, and self-hatred; the same sense of frantic helpless roleplaying;
the same knowledge that real values exist but we cannot measure up to them
The fearful and astonishing modernity of Shakespeare consists in apprehending
this bleak. self-destructive duality.
The world of Troilus and Cressida is betrayed
by that most subtle and profound corruption: that of weariness and the dwindling
of the will. The greatness of this production consists in portraying this
corruption with a dispassionate harshness which becomes, in the end, a source
of unsentimental pity. One or two ideas such as Pandarus playing the piano
at the end, outstay their welcome but such criticisms are dwarfed by the
courage and intelligence of the whole performance. One of the greatest plays
ever written about failure comes masterfully and triumphantly into its own.
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